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Sermon: The Third Sunday after Epiphany (C) - 24th January 2010
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping 7, 8 & 10 am
Readings: Jeremiah 29:4-14, Psalm 145:1-9, 1 Thessalonians 5:12-24, John 8:31-36
Australia Day Commemoration
Australia as we know it today, was established by an unwilling group of prisoners, military men, an unlikely clergyman and the original inhabitants. The convicts and their minders were sent to a strange land, exile, not unlike the Jews who were taken into captivity in Babylon where they lost all that was familiar to them and by so doing so discovered themselves. The prophet Jeremiah, in today’s first reading, seeks to console the people and encourages them by suggesting ways in which they could come to terms with their exile. That teaching still holds today for us because in many ways as the first European settlers discovered, we are still strangers and so journers in a strange land. How then are we to live in Australia in peace?
The Bible modifies our common understandings of the way things are or should be, especially in some of the things we learn about its notions and visions of peace. There are many ways in which they correspond to what we would expect and to our human need for peace and wellbeing. To find one’s peace in enemy territory is not expected. The peace for Israel is to be found in submission and acceptance of foreign domination. If the components sound right, the place sounds wrong, but that is the point about the Lord’s peace. There are often ways in which peace will not fit what we expect or want and there are lines of connection to the peace Christ gives that is not as the world gives. It is real, but it may come by way of a cross or exile.
Yet the vision is still one of peace; the blessing the Lord offers is the possibility of good and wellbeing in the midst of Judgment and punishment. That seems a strange combination. We expect one of the other. The biblical story is often more complex and realistic than our own imaginations. The punishment was real for both prisoner and gaoler. The vast majority of those who went into exile did not return home. Exile is no easy matter. In the midst of exile, there is the possibility of life, even as Jeremiah claimed that in the midst of foreign domination there was the possibility of survival. Nor should we miss the way in which the words of Jeremiah called for the people to “multiply and not decrease” in exile, a restatement of God’s blessing in Genesis. The blessing of God is, often away from the place where we expect it. It may be down in Egypt and lead to slavery: it may come in Babylon in the midst of foreign exile: it maybe in the Great South Land of the Holy Spirit. Blessing, peace and life are possible outside the expected. In Babylon and in Australia, they and we are offered as gifts in the midst of judgment and punishment.
Patriotism and nationalism are so much the order of the day in contemporary society, particularly on Australia Day, that it is hard to contemplate the call to accept domination, to make one’s peace with being deported, to settle in and live normal lives on enemy territory. We are not Judean exiles, but there may be an underlying challenge to some of our absolutes in hearing about their story, if in no other way than making us think about the possible modes of Judgment and survival for either church or nation in our own time. Exile might turn out to be our lot and it can be for us even today in our everyday lives. If it does, at least we know there was a time when God’s people were sent into exile and called to live there, to find their wellbeing by carrying on their lives in a hostile, foreign territory and they survived. The convicts, their guards and the Aborigines survived to become the wonderful nation of which we are now a part.
One of the tasks of settling in to exile is to seek the good in what is happening. It is a call to find one’s wellbeing in seeking blessing in unfortunate situations. How does one live in captivity? Apparently, part of that is in tying oneself to the wellbeing of the captors and the new environment. Jesus suggested that praying for those who persecute us is a part of the way the kingdom of God is established on earth. For Israel, such praying began in Babylon.
In this reading, we encounter one of many instances of the paradox of divine activity in Scripture. The saving work of God is what God has “planned” and proposed. That is the whole point of these verses and the transportation of the convicts to Australia. What is happening is fully the Lord’s doing and is quite intentional, proposed ahead of time. That is true of the judgment and it is true of the deliverance. The text is explicit about the length of time and the Lord’s shaping of this history: “I know the plans I have for you.
At the same time, it is equally true that what happens is very much shaped and affected by human acts, human decision, human words. Such is the case with regard to the divine plan for judgment, for the Lord has spoken often through the prophet to call the people to turn from their sinful ways so that judgment might be averted, that the plan and intention of God might be changed. The future deliverance is also shaped and affected by human words and actions as the prayers of the people go up to God and are heard. There are all sorts of indicators in Scripture that the prayers of the leaders or of the people influence the divine decision and the divine activity. What God intends to do is significantly affected by what human beings do. Therefore, the Lord who intends to bring the people home calls upon them to pray for just that thing to happen so that God may listen and respond. Human freedom and divine will, or, if you will, divine freedom and human will. One end of that polarity is not subordinated to the other. God’s will and freedom do not run rampant over human words and deeds, good or bad, nor does human thinking so control what happens that God is unable to effect the divine purposes. What happens occurs within that tension, so we count on God to be God and pray to God in order to bring that about. Out of the decision of the British government to send convicts to New South Wales, a great nation has sprung up under the guidance of God.
Paul in the second reading, pursues further the idea of peace in difficult situations; “Give thanks in all circumstances”. Most of us would want to adjust Paul’s words to qualify his direction. Perhaps the convicts in their time and we in ours would have liked Paul to say “in some circumstances” or “in some things”. That would be more acceptable for our own practical tastes, more suitable for our own set of realities, but in every circumstance? That has to be one of the most adventurous voyages of thought ever embarked on the rough waters of reason and it seems destined for shipwreck and more exile.
Paul certainly does not qualify the circumstances. He means “all”. Has Paul asked people to do the impossible? Can a person face a fresh set of abuses every day and give thanks? Can a person rise above the scars left by years of abuse at the hands of a parent and give thanks?
Paul’s words may lack qualification, but they do presuppose at least two basic truths. The first is that worship of God is the context for all of life, not just the part we devote to God during our time in church. In the words of the theologian, Karl Rahner, “Everyday life must become itself our prayer”. If all of life is worship for those who seek to do God’s will, then thanks and peace are the inevitable products. In all circumstances we give thanks for Australia even though the going at times can be very rough. Whether good or bad be our lot, a life of worship seeking to please and honour God and doing God’s will means perpetual thanksgiving and the gift of the peace that passes understanding.
Secondly, Paul indicates that life’s depths, not solely its surfaces, must gain our attention. Paul Tillich, another theologian, speaks of the “depth of existence” as the “ground of our historical life ... the ultimate depth of history”. Tillich’s words are not a call for living near the shallow waters of life, where thoughts are restricted to appearances near the shore. Yet, most of us live near shallow waters and we judge our lives by visible, surface and indeed superficial things, that is, the occasional good things or bad things that happen to us.
Paul challenges our nation and us to move to a depth in which there are weightier truths that make it possible for us to give perpetual thanks. From the depths of our history, from which we get a comprehensive frame for life, we can defy circumstances, without ever glibly dismissing them. From the depths of life, a life “hidden with Christ in God”, we can take the onetime cross of shame and declare it to be God’s choice over that which conventionally brings honour. From the depths of life, as the early Australians’ discovered, can come the understanding that in apparent darkness is light and good does come, because God is not a distant God but a God who struggles with humans in life so that in spite of all, good will result. In spite of our earlier struggles and those that confront us at the present and in the future, God has blessed us with our wonderful country.
This sermon composed using The New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol’s VI and XI, 2001 and 2002, Abingdon Press, Nashville.